Money in the bank: Too rich to list: Digital socks: Brothel botherer: Manhole Numpty: and Books of wood.

Shallow, slushy and rough at the Castle this morn (just like the Piss Poor Policies Millionaires Club Coalition), just got back from the stale bread, gruel and pussy food run at Tesco, the roads are fine-no frost no wind, I can’t see what all the fuss is about.

The French farce continues with a longing for an equine steak...

Up to the part of the Smoke that isn’t

Allegedly the Bank of Blighty Monetary Policy Committee is set to announce on Thursday that it is expanding its Quantitative Easing programme from £275bn to £325bn.

Several members of MPC signalled at their January meeting that they would vote for a further round of QE this month.

City economists had thought the committee would approve a further £75bn of asset purchases this month, but services and manufacturing surveys have suggested that the economy performed slightly better than expected in the early weeks of this year.

Yippee-I claim my share.....

And apparently Councils have given Eric (if it moves I’ll eat it) Pickles the middle finger

Despite ordering them to identify staff earning more than £58,200 a year and any spending of more than £500 council chiefs said they had so many well-paid staff the cost of listing them and their responsibilities could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. They also said staff safety would be at risk if the public knew how much they earned.

Other councils claimed that taxpayers lacked the “evaluation skills” to decide whether spending was good value for money and would fall victim to “misunderstandings”. Several insisted there was little demand locally for information on how they spent public money.

 Oh shit.....

Over to the left where bits of sand make billions

The latest fashion accessory is flamboyantly coloured, audaciously patterned socks; it seems that wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd. It’s like a secret handshake for those who have arrived, and for those who want to.

Lee Sylvia, a sock buyer at Sockshop and Shoe Company, which has stores in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, Calif., said that sales of wild socks were up, an observation echoed by other local sock specialists.

Selling particularly well are geometric patterns, pink and purple, orange and black for the San Francisco Giants, socks with words like “bacon” and “beer,” and “anything with ninjas,” she said.

The most popular styles cost $12 to $40 a pair and are made of combed cotton or wool by companies like Happy Socks, Anonymousism, Paul Smith and Corgi.

Sock it to me?

Dahn Unda

A firm of private investigators in Australia has been advertising for a £50,000-a-year 'brothel inspector'.

The post involves "partaking of sexual services" undercover on behalf of local councils in New South Wales.

The Lyonswood Investigations and Forensic Group in Sydney placed the ad for a 'Brothel Buster Investigator' in My Career magazine.

Applicants were required to be unmarried and preferably single, willing to have protected sex with prostitutes and to provide sworn evidence in court.

Lyonswood operations manager Lachlan Jarvis said the job involved visiting suspected illegal brothels and gathering evidence to prove they were offering sexual services.

"Some jobs require the offering of sexual services, some actually require the partaking of sexual services... because it is considered the most convincing evidence," he said.

Mr Jarvis said the ad had proved popular with Sydney job seekers.

"We had dozens if not more than that apply, it was certainly a popular job," he said, "the perfect job for a male."

I could do that-if I had some blood pressure pills...

Up a fair way to the land of brain dead parents

How not to teach your kids about explosives...

And finally:

Left to the place that looks like a high heel

In Padova University is the collection of wooden books, once a collection of roughly a hundred, nearly half of these rare wooden books have been lost or destroyed since their creation in the late 1700s or early 1800s, leaving only 56.

These books are both about trees and constructed of them, each volume is about a different species of tree, with its cover made from the wood of that tree, showing both wood radial, longitudinal, and cross profiles. And on each spine is a section of the tree's bark.

Inside are the book's contents - but rather than paper describing the tree, each book holds bits of the tree itself. Seedlings, leaves, roots, sawdust, charcoal, flowers, and seeds are all fastened in place and numbered. Each book is accompanied by a handwritten piece of parchment with a legend explaining what each sample is.

Now there’s somewhere to visit-if you are tired of life....

That’s it: I’m orf to have a look at Cetus.

And today’s thought:

Angus

Perch, a brothel, make up, a genie and my pussy

First, the weather down ‘ere in ‘Ampshire; overcast, cool no breeze, perfect for mowing the lawn.

Don’t go in the water

There was something lurking in Lac Majeur lake, and it was biting swimmers -six of them: the culprit was: a “monster” two feet three inches long perch.

Two swimmers were treated in hospital for bite wounds up to four inches long after being attacked at the lake, which borders Italy.

Police divers at first tried to capture the carnivorous fish with a net, but when this failed, they pursued the zander with a harpoon and managed to kill it.

"It is quite unusual for perch to bite humans", Mr Croci said.

He added that he suspected the fish was suffering from a hormonal imbalance which could be responsible for its aggression.

So what did they do with the “imbalanced” predator? They served it up to tourists at the lake.



There was another headline later- tourists bite Swimmers at lake in Lac Majeur, but this was kept quiet.

Good news for those of a certain persuasion in Berlin:

A Berlin brothel has come up with a novel way to offset the impact of the global economic crisis and target a new group of customers at the same time - offering a discount to patrons who arrive on bicycles.

Customers who arrive on bicycle or who can prove they took public transportation get a 5-euro ($7) discount from the usual 70-euro ($100) fee for 45 minute sessions, Mr Goetz said. He said the environmentally friendly offer was working a charm.

"We have around 3-5 new customers coming in daily to take advantage of the discount," he said, adding the green rebate has helped alleviate traffic and parking congestion in the neighbourhood.

Germany is one of the few countries in the world where prostitution is legal. It has about 400,000 prostitutes who, since 2002, have been allowed to enter formal labour contracts.


Personally, I’d be too knackered to do anything after a cycle “ride”

Ladies, did you know?

That on average you carry £57-worth of cosmetics in your make-up bags- according to a new poll.

Despite the recession, a survey of more than 1,000 women by cosmetics firm Avon found that Britons are spending £1.1 billion a month on make-up.

Mascara was overwhelmingly the most popular item with 62 per cent of women saying it was an essential purchase, while 38 per cent considered lipstick a 'must-have buy'.

Foundation came a close third with 37 per cent of women saying they had to have it.

Cary Cooper, professor of psychology and health at Lancaster University, said women were probably spending on make-up to help cheer themselves up amid the current economic turmoil.

"Women who feel low want to look better – they go for a haircut, have their nails done or buy new make up. It's a common phenomenon.”

"It may make them feel better at the time but it's what psychologists call a temporary palliative – it doesn't solve the problem but helps them to feel better in the short term."

The study found women between the ages of 16 and 24 carry £69 worth of make-up while 25 to 34-year-old have on average £71 of cosmetics. After this age, women’s’ spending on make-up drops off steadily with the over-55s carrying less than £35 of product.



Another example of “let’s spend money on the bleedin obvious”.

I dream of genie

A family in Saudi Arabia has taken a "genie" to court, accusing it of leaving threatening messages on their mobile phones.

They also claim the spirit has thrown stones at them outside their house and stolen their property.

The family claims to have been forced to move out of the home where they have lived near the city of Medina for 15 years.

A family spokesman said: "We began to hear strange sounds. At first we did not take it seriously, but then stranger things started to happen and the children got particularly scared when the genie started throwing stones."

"A woman spoke to me first, and then a man. They said we should get out of the house."
A local court has now been asked to verify the claims "despite the difficulty" of doing so.

In Islamic theory, are spirits that can harass or possess humans and animas and are often said to be motivated by revenge or jealousy.


Interesting that, I didn’t know genies were into mobile phones, and if you find an oil lamp-DON’T RUB IT!


And finally:

My Pussy

I love my pussy and “researchers” from the University of the bleedin obvious (again) (University of Sussex) have come to the conclusion that cats use a "soliciting purr" to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.

Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a "cry", with a similar frequency to a human baby's.

The team said cats have "tapped into" a human bias - producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.

Dr Karen McComb, the lead author of the study that was published in the journal Current Biology, said the research was inspired by her own cat, Pepo.

"He would wake me up in the morning with this insistent purr that was really rather annoying," Dr McComb told BBC News.

"After a little bit of investigation, I discovered that there are other cat owners who are similarly bombarded early in the morning."

While meowing might get a cat expelled from the bedroom, Dr McComb said that this pestering purr often convinced beleaguered pet lovers to get up and fill their cat's bowl.

She and her team also asked the volunteers to rate the different purrs - giving them a score based on how urgent and pleasant they perceived them to be.

"We could then relate the scores back to the specific purrs," explained Dr McComb. "The key thing (that made the purrs more unpleasant and difficult to ignore) was the relative level of this embedded high-frequency sound."

"How urgent and unpleasant the purr is seems to depend on how much energy the cat puts into producing that cry," said Dr McComb.

Previous studies have found similarities between a domestic cat's cry and the cry of a human baby - a sound that humans are highly sensitive to.

Dr McComb said that the cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring. "But we think that (they) learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans."

She added that the trait seemed to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one
relationship with their owners.

And the millions of cat servants didn’t know that did we?


Angus

Angus Dei politico

Angus Dei-NHS-THE OTHER SIDE